Garlic harvest

It's been a while, but I thought I'd better blow off a few cobwebs and start posting here again. A lot has happened since I last wrote a post, in late 2020, a lot of it rather sad. We lost my mother-in-law on her late husband's birthday in 2021 and then last year, on his wife's birthday, my dad died as a result of a stroke he suffered during the exceptional heatwave in July.

The last time I spoke to Dad was the day I harvested the garlic in 2022 and I generally plant the garlic around the time of his birthday in October, so the plant is going to be forever linked to memories of Dad in my mind.

I harvested the crop a little later this year: it's been a cooler, wetter summer than the average, and the bulbs weren't ready to pull until early August.

I plant around 40 cloves in one of the raised beds. The garlic keeps fairly well in the basement for about six months, but after that, it gets inedible, so this year I decided to try pickling some of the crop to keep it a bit longer.

After it had been curing for a couple of weeks, I reserved ten garlic heads for replanting in October, and chose another ten heads for storing and use over the next few months.

Then it was just a small matter of peeling the cloves of the remaining 20 heads of garlic. Mike gave me a hand, so this didn't take too long.

This quantity of garlic cloves weighed just over a kilogram before we peeled them. They filled one quart jar and one pint one and needed about 600ml of vinegar (yep, still using a hopeless mixture of Imperial and metric measures). I warmed the vinegar up enough to dissolve a couple of teaspoons of pickling salt, then poured it over the garlic. These should keep well in the fridge.

 

Garlic is pretty much the only crop I grow where I can claim any measure of self-sufficiency. I enjoy growing it, cooking with it, and eating it. Now all those things are going to be tinged with a little sadness, but I don't see that as a bad thing.

A greenhouse perambulation

There are six raised beds in our greenhouse and at this time of year they're all in use for various crops. I love going in there and checking on progress, tidying things up and pulling weeds or overgrown lettuces. There are a lot of the latter: I let some of last year's lettuce go to seed and lots of it came up in the spring, in addition to what I sowed myself. Luckily the chickens adore it, overgrown or not, so it doesn't go to waste.

Bed 1 is the first one we built. This year it is full of a range of heirloom tomato plants, with some basil and the inevitable lettuce plant (I'll save the seeds from the two dark red ones you can see in the front here). Most other years I've had problems with blossom end rot on the big tomatoes, but so far so good this year. I put a good layer of chicken manure in this bed before planting it, so maybe that has helped.

Bed 2, the next one along, houses a huge sage bush and some more basil and lettuce (out of shot here). There are three okra plants in this bed - they are only just getting growing properly now, after a cool start to the season. They really need the protection of the greenhouse to put on growth, but they should take off in the next few weeks. There is already one pod forming on the biggest plant - although I managed to miss seeing the flower open! Behind them are a few late tomato plants (sown after I lost the outside ones to the late May frost). The white flower is a cilantro/coriander plant. They are great for attracting pollinators.

Bed 3 was my brassica nursery bed and I left a couple of kale plants in there for an earlier crop - they're producing lots of leaves already, while the ones I transplanted outside are about half this size. Behind the kale are lentils - my first year of successfully growing these (the rabbits got them last year when I sowed them outside!). In the rest of this bed I replaced the transplanted brassicas with beets and some carrots. They are being bothered by a nest of ants, so I've transplanted some sage into the bed, because ants aren't supposed to like it. Doesn't seem to be having any effect so far, though!

Bed 4 was my pea, parsnip and lettuce bed. The peas (Green Arrow and Little Marvel, with Oregon Sugar Snap at the back) are going over now, but I'll keep some to save as seed. I'm slowly pulling up the lettuce for the chickens and in the centre of this bed are my eggplants. Like the okra, they've been slowed up by the cool weather we've been having, but this week they've started to put on more growth and I'm hopeful they'll produce a good crop. It'll help when I pull out the peas which have been shading them, too. I've got three eggplant varieties this year: Applegreen, Korean Early Long and Rosa Bianca. They are all from Baker Creek, although they don't seem to do the Korean Early Long variety any more. These were from a 2012 seed packet, mind you!

Bed 5 is mainly peppers, with some carrots, beets, chard, later-sown tomatoes and already-going-to-seed spinach (I'll save that, too). This bed was also full of self-sown dill and I've been steadily pulling that out to avoid having the same problem next year! Most of the peppers are doing fine - I've put tomato cages round them to give them a bit of extra support before the fruit start coming. I find tomato cages good for peas and cucumbers, too. Note that I use stakes for the actual tomatoes!

A few of the peppers are very pale and a bit small - I'm not sure if this is a defect of the variety (I have failed to label them, as usual!) or a defect of their soil. Since they are all growing in the same place, it would be odd if that were the case, but I'll have to wait for the fruit to form to see if it's the variety that's the problem.

Bed 6 was only supposed to be melons and cucumbers, but the self-sown lettuce took over in here - even growing on the floor! There's still quite a lot of dill in this bed, too.

I haven't grown watermelons before and I didn't realise how huge the plants get. I pulled the cart up to support this one melon, but it's already grown through the end of the cart. I think it's going to take over the whole greenhouse!

Springing up

The snow is going...so slowly...but it is going.

Outside enough has melted to reveal some bulbs starting to emerge.

 On the living room windowsill I've got a small army of herbs growing. I'm hoping to take these to the Seedy Saturday event in Trenton in a few weeks.

I've dug my way through to the greenhouse from the small barn and have sown peas, parsnips, lettuce, leeks and some onions in one of the beds in there. The water is still frozen, so currently the most effective way of watering the seeds is to dig up more snow from outside and sprinkle it over the bed. Effective but not necessarily easy!

First (or last?) harvest

The snow is slowly, slowly melting away as the sun gets stronger. The days are still pretty cold, but at least they are longer now. In the greenhouse the warmth has finally unfrozen the raised beds and I was able to dig up the remainder of my 2013 parsnip crop today. I thought there were only one or two parsnips out there - but I gathered nearly four pounds of them (1.7kg)! Some are on the slender side, but they look pretty good, considering the winter we've had (some nearby carrots had completely rotted away). If it's true that frost makes them taste better, they should be amazing!  

I've been slow to start seeds indoors because I've been so demoralised by the winter, but I did sow a few asparagus seeds a couple of weeks ago and was pleased to see that they've bravely surfaced.

Today I've set up the propagator and sown eight different varieties of peppers and one Cosmos (bipinnatus 'Rubenza' - which I don't remember buying but which looks pretty in the pictures I've found of it online).

I've finally got around to sowing the onions and leeks indoors as well, which my calendar has been reminding me about since late January. I kept hitting 'snooze' on the reminder, telling it to remind me again in a week. I've finally caught up with that one, but the trouble is, I've got reminders for sowing lots of other seeds popping up now as well. It seemed such a good idea last year to set all those reminders up, but I have a feeling that I will never catch up with where I think I should be this year.

Growing fast

The barn swallow chicks are getting to look more like adults. And seem a bit menacing. Or is that just me?

The regular showers we've been getting, combined with summer warmth, have worked their magic on the tender crops. There isn't much difference this year between the greenhouse and the outdoor tomatoes and peppers.

The Tigerella tomatoes are starting to show their stripes:

And the rainbow chard in the greenhouse is just gorgeous:

Working with the weather

Sometimes it makes perfect sense for me to put food on the table by sitting in front of a computer all day. Other days, it makes much more sense for me to put food on the table by, you know, growing food.

Today was one of those days where I give fervent thanks for the ability to work from home and do both. The weather satellite picture showed a band of rain slowly making its way towards us from Toronto and I had three box-loads of tomato plants which really needed to be put in the ground. I mobilised Mike and before breakfast we had spread chicken manure over one of the long beds in the upper part of the barnyard and planted 62 tomato plants.

Then I was back at my computer, working and watching the rain arrive and stay for most of the afternoon. When I went out in the early evening the tomatoes had been well watered into their new locations and I had time to gather up cut grass and mulch the whole area.

I still need to put some stakes in the bed, but at least the hardest part has been done.

In the greenhouse, my early crop of lettuces are beginning to go to seed. I like the tenaciousness of this one, growing out sideways between the planks of one of the raised beds.

The beans are just starting to emerge from the soil outside. It's been full-on with planting and sowing in the last few weeks, but nearly everything is in the ground, thank goodness. Now it's just the weeding to worry about!

Spiderfly

One of the over-ripe tomatoes in the greenhouse had burst on the edge of the raised bed last night and was proving to be a magnet for flies and wasps. I was surprised to see a spider nibbling on some of the fragments of tomato: vegetarian spiders aren't exactly common (there is one, apparently, out of 40,000 species!).

A closer look reveals the truth of the matter: it's really a fly cleverly disguised as a spider.

After a bit of internet-delving I think it's a member of the family Tephritidae (fruit flies); a species with the rather unattractive name of Walnut Husk Maggot (Rhagoletis suavis). According to Wikipedia, the genus name is partially derived from Ancient Greek rhago "a kind of spider". The BugGuide site also notes that some members of this fruit fly family "mimic jumping spiders. The wing-waving apparently deters the approach of jumping spiders, important predators of the flies."

Suffocating squash bugs

As soon as the title of this post came into my mind, it was swiftly followed by the phrase 'sufferin' succotash' - as used by Sylvester the cat and Daffy Duck. Succotash is a dish of corn and beans and my problem was with the other Three Sisters crop: squash. To be even more specific, it was with the cucumber branch of the cucurbit family. The greenhouse and garden cucumber plants have been completely polished off this year. Here's what's left of the cucumber plants (including the inevitable overgrown-pickling-cucumber-I-missed):

And here are the little pests that have done the damage:

Now normally I adopt a 'live and let live' approach to pests, reckoning that eventually the balance of nature will reassert itself and something will come along that eats the pests. But the force of numbers here was too great and my one remaining squash plant (not even sure what it is, to be honest, but I wanted a chance to find out) was in danger of being overwhelmed.

The organic-ish solution was to mix some dish detergent with water and spray the mixture on the bugs. I thought the chickens might be interested in helping, but the two I brought into the greenhouse last night were only interested in nibbling at the lettuce and peppers, despite there being bugs all over the bed. I gave up on that approach and reverted to plan A. The dish detergent mixture  works (the solution stops the bugs from breathing), although I can see that it will take a while before the bug numbers are brought down to a more manageable populations.

Growth

The tomato peppers are plumping up:

And so are the tomatoes, though none have ripened yet. I love the flattened shape of the Marmande variety:

Managed to get a photo of all three chicks at last. They don't sit still for very long, so it's hard to get a picture that isn't just a blur of fluffy movement.

When they're not under the hen, their second favourite place seems to be on her.

Running to seed

Picking things at the appropriate moment isn't something I'm always good at. As a consequence, there are often plants in the greenhouse which get to the flowering stage when they should have been harvested long before. Sometimes, this can be useful - I've got carrots left over from last year, for example, which survived the winter in the greenhouse beds and are now sending up flowers.

The carrots on the right are either Little Finger or Chanteney Red Core. Not sure which.*

The ones on the left are purple carrots. The colour of the flowers makes that fairly clear!

I'm planning on collecting the seeds from these: something I've never done before. There are so many flowers that I don't think I'll ever have to buy carrot seed again...

Something similar happened with some salad onions that I failed to pull last year.

You can see the black seeds in the one below, almost ready to drop. I picked this and two other seedheads and put them in a bag to finish drying out.

All these flowers are doing a good job of attracting pollinating insects into the greenhouse, which is just what I need as the tomatoes are flowering now. There are even respectable-sized fruit on some of them.

The pepper plants are starting to flower, too. This grasshopper was almost perfectly camouflaged against one of the new leaves.

*Labelling of crops being another personal point of failure...

Escapees

These dill seedlings shouldn't be here, really. Behind them are the beetroot seedlings which I did sow in this greenhouse bed. But the dill is so beautiful with the morning dew on it that I'm letting them stay for now.

I've also got a lot of self-seeded flat-leaved parsley in the greenhouse. Another handsome plant that I'm loath to pull up.

I was startled to find these four chickens out of place yesterday. The barrier at the back of the orchard had blown down in Thursday's high winds. Most of the chickens stayed put, but these intrepid few decided to go exploring. I found another pair by the greenhouse later in the day. When we first got the chickens, we spent a lot of time chasing them back into the orchard - it's interesting that now most of them are happy to stay within its bounds, even when one of them has been removed.

Year of the Rabbit

You might think that the depths of winter would be fairly quiet on the destructive-animal-pest front in the garden. There isn't anything growing at this time of year for them to eat, after all.

It was such a beautiful morning here that I decided it was time to bring the greenhouse out of its winter hibernation mode and sow some seeds in there. The soil was warm, dry, and teeming with centipedes. Mike reconnected the water supply and I got to work, sowing carrots, beets, rocket, spinach and some lettuce and pak choi seeds in one of the beds. The dead-looking leaves in the corners are last year's parsley plants, which don't look very lively at the moment, but should burst back into abundant growth soon.

We had some high winds last week which blew out one of the small panels in the corner of the greenhouse.

I hadn't really given it a lot of thought, apart from adding it to the mental 'tasks to be done' list. The panel is nowhere to be found, so it's going to be a case of finding something suitable to plug the gap.

What I hadn't considered is that this gives a handy entrance to the greenhouse for winter-starved creatures. When I started watering one of the other beds, evidence of their activity was all too clear:

They'd been feasting on the last of my over-wintered carrots:

So suddenly it's become quite a priority to get that entrance hole fixed. Otherwise word will spread that I'm running a nice little rabbit restaurant and the plants from all the seeds I sowed this morning will be feeding Flopsy, Mopsy, Peter and Cotton-tail instead of us.

Sometimes I think Mr McGregor got a bad rap.

Good Friday progress

The new greenhouse beds are full of soil now. I sowed broccoli, cauliflower, cabbages and romanesco in the far one this morning, using it as a nursery bed. I did the same last year and it worked very well. Although I haven't sown as much cabbage as I did last year (learned my lesson, there: we're still eating sauerkraut...).

Last year's beds are getting fairly full of seedlings already. I put up some wire for the sugar snap peas to cling on to. In front of those, carrots are germinating and I'm being as diligent as I can about thinning them. I've also sown peas, carrots and parsnips outside. The rodent-proofed peas are beginning to germinate: only five up so far, but that's five more than I had without the chilli experiment, so it was at least partially successful!

If you look at the top picture, you'll notice that we've got the side wall of the greenhouse rolled up. It was over 30°C in there at 10am (pushing 90°F!). Which I'm only saying to upset my friends and family in the UK, whose Easter weather is being less clement.

Experiment in rodent-proofing peas

The Oregon Sugar Pod II peas are coming up beautifully in the greenhouse:

The Lincoln peas I sowed a few days earlier failed to appear and it soon became clear that they had all been consumed by rodents unknown. I don't know why they are so appealing and the other ones aren't. I still had some seeds left, so this time I thought I'd experiment with a chilli deterrent. I ground up three of last year's dried cayenne peppers, added them to a bowl of water and then soaked the peas for a few hours. My idea was that the infusion would make the peas less palatable to whatever was digging them up (although I should note that the chilli-coated bird seed wasn't much of a deterrent to the squirrels). I sowed them in the same spot and then tipped the bits of chilli and the soaking water over the peas before covering them up with soil.

This morning, there were some small holes in the soil but it does look as though once the creature hit the layer of chilli fragments, it gave up. Time will tell - I'll report back on whether it worked or not.

The slight (and possibly obvious to you) flaw in my method, which only occurred to me after I had covered over the peas, is that those pepper seeds from the dried peppers are probably perfectly viable. Which means that I may well be getting pepper seedlings germinating along with the peas. Oops. Oh well, it's far too early to be sowing peppers in the greenhouse, so even if they do germinate, I doubt they'll last very long!

Covered

After yesterday's trailer shenanigans, today Mike made the three new raised beds in the greenhouse, which now looks satisfyingly full of growing space.

Most of the seeds I've sown in there so far are in the central bed on the right (the one with the extra protection of a floating row cover). The rockets seedlings have been the first to emerge.

It was warm in there, so we seized the dog and the opportunity of giving him a good wash. For which we were rewarded in time-honoured fashion: